Why People Get Married
Today, Elana and I got to spend a nice amount of time together, helping each other process what we’d been told yesterday and get into a better mind-space. Sharing jokes, enjoying knitting, and all sorts of other things gave us both some of the boost we needed. All of the support from family and friends certainly contribute to this as well. Even so, we’re each stronger because of the other.
Numb3rs up
Overall my cell counts progressed up still, which is a good sign. For the first time, my neutrophils (the important white cells they’re most interested in) actually appeared with a non-zero value of 0.1. If my doctor decides to start my second chemo cycle next week, those will go away, but right now I don’t care: there are some where there weren’t enough for the system to care before.
Going all dairy-like
Because the small boxes of milk weren’t available, I got container of a full liter of milk with breakfast. I accepted this as a challenge: instead of just using a bit for cereal and tea, and giving it back, I decided to drink the whole thing. I need to gain weight anyway. Surprisingly, it didn’t take very long. Like one Sudoku puzzle.
Given that idea, tomorrow morning I’m going to have 4 or 5 yogurts for breakfast. (They apparently have tons.) I’ll either hate it, or it’ll be happily filling.
Cross-matching with blood donors
This afternoon, they did some blood draws to use for doing cross-match with donors for a planned blood transfusion tomorrow. (First transfusion in more than a week, showing my body is using the red cells well.) I think concept of the matching is really cool. It makes perfect sense, having actually thought about it—it’d be silly for me to expect a big shelf full of bloods of particular types and where they could just pull off a bag and go with it. There are other specific criteria (which I don’t know) to make sure it’s exactly the right match.
I asked one of the nurses what the correct term is for the container used to hold blood involved in a blood transfusion. (Same kind of thing used to hold basic fluids, though a bit stronger apparently.) Kind of like the term “duck mask“, they just call them a “blood bag”. I wonder if there’s a different name used in America or other English-speaking countries? (Nudge, nudge.)
Guys can knit, I’ve got proof
Today was a knitting victory. Four or five rows, twenty stitches (or “20 sts” for those in the field), all correct! I’m not dropping rows stitches (technical term) as often, but I still slip up and do yarn-overs relatively frequently. A good friend has praised me for this, saying it’s a sign I’m already making progress on learning how to knit lace. Can’t offer that this was my plan, but I’ll happily accept this as a side-effect. But maybe I’ll get the basic act of knitting down before consider actually creating lace.
Not to say I won’t try, someday.
